If it’s happening in politics, economics, world affairs, contemporary culture, or the realm of ideas and values, chances are you will find a fresh, thoughtful post about it on our ’76 Blog. Contributors come from all walks of life and all over the map.

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Each month in Centennial Review, we publish essays on the fundamentals of a free and just society, adapted from speeches given by leading voices at our think tank or in the CCU community. Read this month's Centennial Review to find out what we're discussing.

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As Colorado Christian University’s think tank, we draw on the expertise of CCU Faculty, Centennial Institute Fellows, and other skilled policy analysts to provide background and recommendations on current issues facing policymakers in Colorado and the nation.

If it’s happening in politics, economics, world affairs, contemporary culture, or the realm of ideas and values, chances are you will find a fresh, thoughtful post about it on our ’76 Blog. Contributors come from all walks of life and all over the map.

Recent Posts

Each month in Centennial Review, we publish essays on the fundamentals of a free and just society, adapted from speeches given by leading voices at our think tank or in the CCU community. Read this month's Centennial Review to find out what we're discussing.

Latest Reviews

As Colorado Christian University’s think tank, we draw on the expertise of CCU Faculty, Centennial Institute Fellows, and other skilled policy analysts to provide background and recommendations on current issues facing policymakers in Colorado and the nation.

How Left gets its way with language

How Left gets its way with language

“Defense Secretary Robert Gates says the Obama administration had no choice but to order the shutdown of the prison at Guantanamo because ‘the name itself is a condemnation’ of U.S. anti-terrorism strategy,” said a news item this week. Okay, let’s think about this.

Here we have a high official supinely conceding that the Left’s poisoning tactics can fatally stigmatize something, anything, they happen to hate — anything the Left and its slavish media decide to subject to years of constant battering. That poisoning itself now becomes the reason driving US policy.

Isn’t this a little circular? Why does the thing-named (fill-in-the-blank) have to go? Simply because the Left’s stigmatizing and vicious poisoning campaign has been so propagandistically powerful that the very name Guantanamo (or George Bush or Sarah Palin or Dick Cheney) has been damned and demonized into a self-evident “condemnation.”

In other words, this admission of the resulting condemnation-effect caused by a hammering hate campaign by the Media and the Left is now being used by Gates, our nation’s Secretary of Defense, as the basis for the implementation of a national policy!

By the same token, any Obama spokesman can announce that the very names, Bush or Palin or Cheney or Guantanamo, are sufficient reasons in themselves for those named persons or places or things TO BE CONDEMNED.

This spin-effect originated with Hilter, Stalin, Mao, Ho, Pol Pot, Fidel, and Chavez. But now we see it being openly expressed by the executive branch as a sufficient basis for supporting a national policy—all other rational arguments made from reason MUST BOW AT THE HIP.

The Left is masterful at getting its way with language, self-validating trigger words to engender positive or negative emotions and resultant mindless compliance by the target audience. Here is a vivid example on the negative side.